CONTENTS

About the Book

The definitive work on the Vietnam War, the conflict that came to define a generation, told from all sides by those who were there.

More than forty years after the Vietnam War ended, its legacy continues to fascinate, horrify and inform us. As the first war to be fought in front of TV cameras and beamed around the world, it has been immortalised on film and on the page, and forever changed the way we think about war.

Drawing on hundreds of brand new interviews, Ken Burns and Geoffrey C. Ward have created the definitive work on Vietnam. It is the first book to show us the war from every perspective: from idealistic US Marines and the families they left behind to the Vietnamese civilians, both North and South, whose homeland was changed for ever; politicians, POWs and anti-war protesters; and the photographers and journalists who risked their lives to tell the truth. The book sends us into the grit and chaos of combat, while also expertly outlining the complex chain of political events that led America to Vietnam.

Beautifully written, this essential work tells the full story without taking sides and reminds us that there is no single truth in war. It is set to redefine our understanding of a brutal conflict, to launch provocative new debates and to shed fresh light on the price paid in ‘blood and bone’ by Vietnamese and Americans alike.

About the Author

GEOFFREY C. WARD is the author of nineteen books, including A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the NBCC Award, the Francis Parkman Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

KEN BURNS is the legendary producer and director of numerous film series. His landmark film The Civil War was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television. His work has won numerous prizes, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards, and a nomination for an Academy Award.

ALSO BY GEOFFREY C. WARD

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (with Ken Burns)

A Disposition to Be Rich: Ferdinand Ward, the Greatest Swindler of the Gilded Age The War: An Intimate History (with Ken Burns)

Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (with Wynton Marsalis)

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

Mark Twain (with Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns)

Jazz: A History of America’s Music (with Ken Burns)

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (with Ken Burns)

The Year of the Tiger

The West: An Illustrated History

Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley

Baseball: An Illustrated History (with Ken Burns)

Tiger-Wallahs: Encounters with the Men Who Tried to Save the Greatest of the Cats (with Diane Raines Ward)

American Originals: The Private Worlds of Some Singular Men and Women

The Civil War: An Illustrated History (with Ken Burns and Ric Burns)

A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905

Treasures of the World: The Maharajahs

ALSO BY KEN BURNS

The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (with Geoffrey C. Ward)

The War: An Intimate History (with Geoffrey C. Ward)

Mark Twain (with Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan)

Jazz: A History of America’s Music (with Geoffrey C. Ward)

Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (with Geoffrey C. Ward)

Lewis & Clark (with Dayton Duncan)

The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (with Amy S. Burns)

Baseball: An Illustrated History (with Geoffrey C. Ward)

The Civil War: An Illustrated History (with Geoffrey C. Ward and Ric Burns)

List of Illustrations

LIST OF MAPS

Vietnam Divided

The French Indochinese Union

The La Drang Campaign

South Vietnam Divided

US Outposts in I Corps and Leatherneck Square

Hue 1968

August 23, 1968

Ho Chi Minh Trail

The Cambodian Incursion

Introduction

by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

ON APRIL 23, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford was scheduled to give the keynote address at the Tulane University convocation in New Orleans. As the president took the stage, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese troops were massing on the outskirts of Saigon, having overrun almost all of South Vietnam in just three months. Thirty years after the United States first became involved in Southeast Asia, ten years after the Marines had landed in Danang, the ill-fated country for which more than 58,000 Americans had died was on the verge of defeat. “We, of course, are saddened indeed by the [tragic] events in Indochina,” the president said. He reminded the subdued crowd that 160 years earlier America had recovered from another conflict in which she had suffered “humiliation and a measure of defeat”—the War of 1812—and promised that the nation would once again “regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam.” But, he continued to thunderous applause, “it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” The time had come, the president said, “to unify, to bind up the nation’s wounds … ​and begin a great national reconciliation.” Just seven days later, North Vietnamese soldiers stormed the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon and raised the communist flag. The Vietnam War was over.

It’s been more than forty years now, and despite President Ford’s optimism, we have been unable to put that war behind us. The deep wounds it inflicted on our nation, our communities, our families, and our politics have festered. As Army veteran Phil Gioia said in an interview for our documentary series, “The Vietnam War drove a stake right into the heart of America. It polarized the country as it had probably never been polarized since before the Civil War, and we’ve never recovered.”

Nearly ten years ago, as we were completing post-production on a seven-part series about the American experience in World War II, we resolved to turn our attention to the painful, bitter, confounding, and much misunderstood tragedy that was the war in Vietnam. It has been our privilege throughout this undertaking to collaborate with the writer, Geoffrey C. Ward, and our producer, Sarah Botstein, along with our team of editors, researchers, and coproducers. We were also ably assisted by an invaluable board of advisers, historical consultants, and veterans of the war who saved us from innumerable mistakes, but, more important, pointed us to the critical moments and astonishing contradictions that haunt any serious study of the Vietnam War.

From the start, we vowed to each other that we would avoid the limits of a binary political perspective and the shortcuts of conventional wisdom and superficial history. This was a war of many perspectives, a Rashomon of equally plausible “stories,” of secrets, lies, and distortions at every turn. We wished to try to contain and faithfully reflect those seemingly irreconcilable outlooks.

We were interested in trying to understand the colonial experience of the French—and the way it eerily prefigured what would befall the United States in subsequent years. We wanted to find out what actually happened in the halls of power in Washington, Saigon, and Hanoi, and to get to know the leaders who made the decisions that determined the fates of millions. Through the availability of recently declassified records, ongoing scholarship, and revelatory, sometimes shocking, audio recordings, the actions and motives of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon are laid bare, as are the complicated power struggles going on in South Vietnam during the autocratic, ruthless regime of Ngo Dinh Diem and the succession of generals who followed him. Of particular focus for us were the fascinating political dynamics in Hanoi, where the familiar figure of Ho Chi Minh fought for supremacy with other less well-known but more powerful figures.

Most important, we wanted to understand what the war was like on the battlefield and on the home front, and we wanted to find out why, as Marine veteran Karl Marlantes told us, Americans have been unable to have a civil conversation about one of the most consequential events in our history. “For years, we just did not talk about that war,” he said. “You would open your mouth and you’d ask, which side was this person on? Am I going to get into a fight here? It’s like living in a family with an alcoholic father … ​You know, shh, we don’t talk about that.”

Wars, all wars, create a kind of dissonance that obfuscates and deflects clear understanding. Vietnam is no different. To shed new light on such a complicated and unsettled time in our history, to struggle to comprehend the special dissonance that is the Vietnam War, we needed to look beyond the familiar stories Americans have told about the war and include as many different perspectives as our narrative could accommodate. Nearly one hundred “ordinary” people agreed to share their stories with us on camera: grunts and officers in the Army and Marines, prisoners of war, a fighter pilot and a helicopter crew chief, a Gold Star mother and the sister of a fallen soldier, a nurse, college students, reporters, protesters, military analysts, spies, and many others. To have been present as they bore witness to their experiences remains for us one of the enduring gifts of this project.

Throughout our long production, we were inspired by the architect Maya Lin, whose Vietnam Veterans Memorial was initially as controversial as the war itself, but which has become one of America’s sacred places. When she unveiled her design in 1981, Lin told the press that her memorial to the Americans who died in the war would be a journey “that would make you experience death, and where you’d have to be an observer, where you could never really fully be with the dead … ​[It isn’t] something that was going to say, It’s all right, it’s all over. Because it’s not.” Nothing, certainly not our film or book, can make the tragedy of the Vietnam War all right. But we can, and we must, honor the courage, heroism, and sacrifice of those who served, those who died, and those who participated in the war against the war. As filmmakers, we have tried to do that the only way we know how: by listening to their stories. “It’s almost going to make me cry,” Army veteran Vincent Okamoto told us, remembering the infantry company he led in Vietnam in 1968. “Nineteen-, twenty-year-old high school dropouts that come from the lowest socioeconomic rung of American society … ​they didn’t have the escape routes that the elite and the wealthy and the privileged had … ​but to see these kids, who had the least to gain … ​they weren’t going be rewarded for their service in Vietnam. And yet their infinite patience, their loyalty to each other, their courage under fire, was just phenomenal. And you would ask yourself: how does America produce young men like this?”

While Okamoto and hundreds of thousands of other Americans were fighting and dying in a brutal and bloody war overseas, hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens were taking to the streets back home to protest that war. As the anti-war activist Bill Zimmerman recalled for us, “People who supported the war were fond of saying ‘My country right or wrong … ​or better dead than red.’ Those sentiments seemed insane to us. We don’t want to live in a country that we’re going to support whether it’s right or wrong … ​so we began an era in which two groups of Americans, both thinking that they were acting patriotically, went to war with each other.” A chasm opened in American society, and on both sides of the divide things were said—and things were done—that could never be unsaid, could never be undone. “When I see the war protesters … ​intellectually I certainly understand their right to the freedom of speech,” Army adviser James Willbanks remembered, “but I will tell you that when I see them waving NLF flags, the enemy that I and my friends had to fight and some of my friends had to die fighting, that doesn’t sit very well with me.”

When Americans talk about the Vietnam War, the scholar and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen wrote, too often we are just talking about ourselves. We were determined not to make that mistake. How could we hope to make sense of this turbulent time in our history, or to explore the humanity and the inhumanity of all sides, without hearing directly from our allies and our enemies—the Vietnamese soldiers and civilians we fought with, and against? Off and on for several years, we traveled to Texas, California, and Virginia to get to know many Vietnamese Americans who came to the United States as refugees, having suffered the unimaginable loss not just of their families, friends, and comrades, but of their country. They spoke honestly about the failings of their own government, and shared their doubts and fears about whether the Republic of South Vietnam under Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky had been worth fighting for. “Thieu [and] Ky, they were corrupt,” Saigon native Phan Quang Tue remembered. “They abused their position. And they received more from Vietnam than Vietnam received from them. We paid a very high price for having leaders like Ky and Thieu. And we continue to pay the price.”

To understand what the war was like for the winners, we traveled to Vietnam, traversing the length of the country, meeting and interviewing veterans and civilians. We were surprised to discover that the war remains as unsettled and painful for them as it is for us. For decades, they too have avoided speaking about what happened. The memory of the nearly incomprehensible price they paid in “blood and bone” has been too grievous. But now, as they near the end of their lives, they want their families, and the world, to know what they went through. “The war we fought,” General Lo Khac Tam told us on camera, “was so horribly brutal I don’t have words to describe it. I worry, how can we ever explain to the younger generation the price their parents and grandparents paid?” For Bao Ninh, a foot soldier in the North Vietnamese Army, who became a celebrated novelist after the war, the official public narrative celebrating their great, noble victory rings hollow: “People sing about victory, about liberation,” he told us. “They’re wrong. Who won and who lost is not a question. In war, no one wins or loses. There is only destruction. Only those who have never fought like to argue about who won and who lost.”

In the winter of 2015, as we were nearing the end of the editing phase of the project, we invited Nguyen Ngoc, an 85-year-old veteran of the North Vietnamese Army (now a revered scholar and teacher of literature), to travel from Danang to Walpole, New Hampshire, where we screened the fine cut of the film and asked him to share his thoughts about the war with us. After reflecting on the stories he saw on-screen, he told us that the time had come for them to be told; the people of Vietnam, he said, “are starting to rethink the war, to ask the questions. Was the war necessary to achieve justice? Was it right? What is most important now is to find some meaning, some lessons in the war for our lives.”

There is no single truth in war, as this difficult story reminded us at every turn. Each of us can only see the world as we are; we are all prisoners of our own experience. We did not set out to answer every question embedded in this lamentable chapter in history. With open minds and open hearts we simply tried to listen to the brave and honest testimony of a remarkable group of men and women. If we have been able to find some meaning in this devastating calamity, it is in no small measure thanks to their generosity, humility, and humanity, for which we are profoundly grateful.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
Walpole, New Hampshire

  1  

Déjà Vu

1858–1961

THE PATRIOT

FOR SIX MONTHS in the winter, spring, and summer of 1919, Paris was the center of the world. The Great War had ended. The victorious Great Powers—Britain, France, Italy, and the United States—were redrawing much of the world’s map, “as if they were dividing cake,” one diplomat noted in his diary.

The city’s streets teemed with petitioners from nearly everywhere on earth, eager to enhance their own position in the final settlement: Africans, Armenians, Bessarabians, Irishmen, Koreans, Kurds, Poles, Ukrainians, Palestinians, Zionists, and desert Arabs in flowing white robes all elbowed their way past French war widows dressed in black. The British diplomat Harold Nicolson compared the colorful scene to “a riot in a parrot house.”

A good many of these supplicants asked to see President Woodrow Wilson, whose American delegation was housed in the Hôtel de Crillon. “About every second man … ​one meets,” the journalist Ray Stannard Baker noted, “fishes out of his pocket a copy of a cablegram that he or his committee has just sent to President Wilson. It is marvelous indeed how all the world is turning to the president! The people believe he means what he says, and that he is a great man set upon securing a sound peace.”

And so, on June 18, when a gaunt 29-year-old Asian man in a rented morning coat appeared at the door of the American suite and asked if he might see Wilson, it caused no particular stir. The visitor did not get an appointment—the president and his wife were out of town that day, in any case, touring the Belgian battlefields—but a secretary politely accepted a petition from him. It set forth a series of requests on behalf of the people of what we now call Vietnam, then under French control.

There is no evidence that Wilson ever saw the petition, but it was understandable that colonized peoples looked to him for help. His Fourteen Points, the wartime statement of Allied principles intended to guarantee fairness in the peace negotiations, had pledged that during “the free, open-minded and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” the interests of the colonized should be given “equal weight” with those of the colonizers.

That was precisely what the Vietnamese petitioners wanted. As a subject people, they declared, Wilson’s advocacy of self-determination had filled them “with hope … ​that an era of rights and justice [was opening] to them.” They did not demand independence from France, but they did call for “a permanent delegation of native people elected to attend the French parliament” as well as freedom of speech and association and foreign travel, technical and professional schools in every province, and equal treatment under the law.

The petitioner may have been disappointed that he’d been unable to see the American president, but his visit to the Hôtel de Crillon was just one of many stops he made in Paris that season. The Western world was woefully ignorant of the plight of the colonized people of Indochina, he told a friend. “We need to make a lot of noise in order to become known.” He pressed his petition on other delegations to the peace talks and on members of the National Assembly, saw to it that it was published in the left-wing newspaper L’Humanité, persuaded a trade union to print up thousands of copies and had them handed out to Paris crowds—and then dispatched thousands more to Vietnam, to be distributed on the streets of Saigon, the largest city in the South.

The French Ministry of Colonies and the secret police demanded to know just who this agitator was. Three undercover agents were assigned to report on his every move. He called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc—“Nguyen the Patriot”—but his real name was Nguyen Tat Thanh. During his long, shadowy career he would assume some seventy different identities, finally settling on “Ho the Most Enlightened”—Ho Chi Minh—the name by which he remains best known (and by which he will be known in these pages).

Ho was born sometime between 1890 and 1893, ten miles west of the city of Vinh in the province of Nghe An. His father, who began life as a rice farmer, served briefly as a minor official in the colonial regime, but resented the French nonetheless. He sent his son to the finest Franco-Vietnamese schools, believing that unless young Vietnamese better understood the world of their colonial masters they could never become free of them. One of Ho’s French teachers hailed him as a “very distinguished student,” but in the spring of 1908, he got into trouble. When hundreds of peasants gathered in the imperial capital of Hue to protest rising agricultural taxes, forced labor, and rampant corruption, Ho volunteered to act as an interpreter when they confronted the French authorities. Things got out of hand. Colonial security forces opened fire.

Shadowed by the French secret police, Ho fled south, went into hiding for a time, and then in 1911, at the age of twenty-one, signed on as an assistant cook aboard a steamship bound from Saigon to Marseille. “The people of Vietnam,” he said many years later, “including my own father, often wondered who would help them to remove the yoke of French control. Some said Japan, others Great Britain, and some said the United States. I saw that I must go abroad to see for myself. After I had figured out how they lived, I would return to help my countrymen.”

He would not return for thirty years. It is impossible to know precisely where he went and what he did over much of that time. In France, he applied for a scholarship to the Colonial School that prepared civil servants to run the empire, hoping, he wrote, that the training he received might benefit his “compatriots.” His application was turned down. He returned to the sea, and witnessed the impact of European colonialism in the African and Asian ports visited by the ships on which he served. He seems to have lived in London for two years, studying English and working at the Carlton Hotel as an assistant to the celebrated chef Auguste Escoffier. He also evidently visited the United States twice, working as a pastry chef at the Parker House in Boston, cooking for a wealthy Brooklyn family, and visiting Harlem to hear Marcus Garvey denounce racism, before turning up in Paris for the peace talks.

French records suggest that Ho landed in France again, just weeks before he tried to see President Wilson. Frail-looking and shabbily dressed, he seemed an unlikely revolutionary at first. He stuttered when called upon to speak in public and seemed so diffident that some Parisian radicals dismissed him as “the mute of Montmartre.” But he quickly proved a prolific propagandist—“indefatigable,” said one intelligence report—and increasingly scornful of older expatriate Vietnamese who urged patience in the belief that France might somehow be persuaded to reform its rule. He joined the French Socialist Party because he thought it exemplified the values of liberté, égalité et fraternité that had inspired the French Revolution and was bitterly disappointed when his comrades proved largely uninterested in extending the protection of those principles to the people of the French colonies. But then he discovered the writings of the mastermind of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin. Lenin shared the orthodox Marxist view that real revolution could only be achieved in industrial nations. But he also thought anti-colonial movements had an important role to play in overthrowing global capitalism. He argued that agents should establish communist parties in colonized countries, join forces with other nationalist groups, and then, once their colonial masters had been overthrown, jettison their non-communist allies and seize power in the name of international communism.

Interviewed many years later about the impact upon him of Lenin’s writings, Ho’s stilted language could not disguise his initial excitement: “What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me! I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to liberation.’ “

In 1920, when the radical wing of the French Socialist Party broke away to form the French Communist Party, he went with them.

Minister of Colonies Albert Sarraut, a reformer who genuinely wanted to better the lives of France’s Vietnamese subjects but without granting them political autonomy, summoned Ho to his office and alternately threatened him and tried to buy him off. Those who aligned themselves with “Bolsheviks” would be crushed, he warned, but if Ho were willing to cooperate with French authorities his future could be very bright. Ho was unmoved, or so he remembered many years later. “The main thing in my life and what I need most of all is freedom for my compatriots,” he said, rising from his chair. “May I go now?”

The government rescinded Ho’s passport, intending to keep him in France and under continuing surveillance, but in June 1923 he managed to slip out of the country disguised as a Chinese businessman, and head for Moscow. There, he underwent training at the newly established University of the Toilers of the East, and argued before the Communist International that if it wished to defeat the imperialist powers, their colonies—and the all-important raw materials they provided—would first have to be ripped from them; otherwise, he said, the Comintern would be powerless, like the man who tried to kill a snake by stepping on its tail.

He was sent to southern China, determined to put Lenin’s precepts into practice among the Vietnamese students living there. In 1925, he created the Revolutionary Youth League of Vietnam, which welcomed both communist and non-communist nationalists and trained many of Vietnam’s future leaders. He also drafted The Revolution Path, a training manual that shrewdly blended Marxist dogma with Confucian precepts and practical considerations. “Peasants believe in facts, not theories,” he wrote. In 1930, he helped establish what became the Indochinese Communist Party.

He remained constantly on the move, eluding French agents and changing names and destinations. He disguised himself as a Buddhist monk and a Chinese reporter, spent two years in a British jail in Hong Kong, was presumed dead by many of his old comrades, and, when he managed to talk his way to freedom, was suspected by some in Moscow of making a deal with the enemy and sidelined.

During the 1930s, Ho remembered, his was “a voice crying in the wilderness.” But through it all, one friend recalled, he remained “taut and quivering … ​with only one thought, his country, Vietnam.”

THOSE BLUE-EYED, YELLOW-BEARDED PEOPLE

AS A NATION-STATE, Vietnam is younger than the United States. The S-shaped region we now know as Vietnam—stretching more than a thousand miles from China’s southern border to the Ca Mau Peninsula in the Gulf of Thailand—was not effectively united under a single ruler until 1802. In that year, a general who called himself Gia Long emerged from thirty years of civil war and established the Nguyen dynasty.

But the roots of Vietnamese civilization stretch back much farther, to the centuries before the Christian era when Chinese chroniclers wrote of the “hundred Viets”—an assortment of non-Chinese peoples scattered across the Red River Delta in the North. (“Viet” in Chinese meant “those from beyond”—foreigners.) Off and on for a thousand years, Chinese rulers sought to conquer these groups, and Vietnamese folklore is filled with the stories of heroes and heroines who led resistance against them.

The Vietnamese may have often resented their powerful neighbor to the north, but their daily lives came to be profoundly influenced by Chinese culture—from the chopsticks they wielded to the way in which they were governed. The education and civil service systems followed strict Confucian lines; to serve the emperor, mandarins, or scholar-officials, had to pass rigorous tests in subjects that included classical Chinese history, literature, and calligraphy. Court business was conducted in Chinese by courtiers wearing Chinese dress. Even the formidable citadel the Nguyen emperors built for themselves at Hue was modeled after the imperial Forbidden City in Beijing; only the ruler and his household were allowed inside its innermost enclosure.

French mercenaries armed with up-to-date weaponry had helped Gia Long establish his empire, and he had granted trading concessions to them in exchange for their help. But neither he nor any of his successors was comfortable with their presence or with that of the European missionaries who had been at work converting Vietnamese to Roman Catholicism for more than a century.

In 1858, when the emperor had two missionaries executed, France sent a fleet to seize the port of Danang. French naval forces took Saigon the following year and then forced the emperor to cede the three surrounding provinces to them. Over the four decades that followed, French forces captured Hue and Hanoi and steadily extended their power and influence until the French colonial government could officially declare in 1900 that the “pacification of Indochina” was complete. “The great [Indochinese] possessions,” wrote an early colonial administrator, “should be organized as true states … ​and made to possess all the characteristics that define states, except one: political independence.”

France divided Vietnam into three parts: the French colony of Cochinchina, which encompassed the sprawling, sparsely peopled Mekong Delta in the South; and two “protectorates”—Annam, the poorest and most mountainous part of the country, just thirty miles wide at its narrowest point, and Tonkin, the densely populated Red River Delta. These protectorates were nominally overseen by a compliant descendant of the Nguyen emperors, but actually ruled—along with Laos and Cambodia—as part of the Indochinese Union by a French governor-general from his palace in Hanoi.

The French claimed they had begun to amass their Indochinese empire simply to protect the Christian faithful and professed always to be undertaking a “civilizing mission,” meant to bring material and cultural benefits to an allegedly benighted people. But their initial motives were less lofty. French Indochina was meant to provide a path for penetrating the Chinese market and create a buffer against the British and Dutch, who had already carved empires of their own from India, Burma, Malaya, and Indonesia.

More important, it provided the bright prospect of fortunes to be made through exploitation of the land and its people. To that end, the French would transform much of the Vietnamese landscape. In Cochinchina, they carved out a complex network of canals that turned tens of thousands of acres of marshy wilderness into some of the most productive rice-growing country on earth. They developed modern ports at Haiphong and Danang and Saigon, too, so that Vietnamese raw materials could more efficiently be shipped abroad and French-manufactured goods could more easily be unloaded. They also built a railroad to move French products north from Saigon all the way to China; one out of three of the more than 100,000 Vietnamese conscripted to lay its tracks is thought to have died along the way. The French hacked down highland forests as well, displacing tribal people who depended on them for their livelihood, and planted millions of rubber trees in their place; the miserably paid contract workers who tapped the trees were ravaged by malaria and “treated like human cattle,” one colonist admitted, and “terrorized by the overseers… ​On the rubber plantations the people had a habit of saying that children did not have a chance to know their fathers, nor dogs their masters.” In the North, tens of thousands of contract laborers risked their lives beneath the earth, mining coal, tin, tungsten, and zinc for the benefit of investors in France. They worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and those who tried to get away were often beaten before being forced back to work.

The French largely lived apart from their subjects on plantation estates and in neighborhoods designed and built to look as much as possible like those at home. Most did not bother to learn the language spoken by their subjects. In 1910, the year before Ho Chi Minh fled Cochinchina, a government survey found that just three French officials in the whole colony understood Vietnamese well enough to make policy decisions on their own. The French depended instead on a network of French-speaking Vietnamese willing to carry out their wishes—and all too often eager to enrich themselves in the process.

Other Vietnamese benefited by colonial rule. They became bankers, merchants, or landlords in Cochinchina, where the availability of cheap, newly opened lands created a fresh entrepreneurial frontier for those with enough capital to get started. These privileged people created a Westernized urban world of their own; they spoke French, drank wine, and followed Paris fashions.

But for the peasants who made up 90 percent of Vietnam’s population, colonial rule provided few benefits. Subject to French monopolies on salt and alcohol, sometimes dragooned to labor without pay on public works, burdened by ever-climbing taxes and saddled by debt, many stood by helplessly as lands they once had owned slipped into the hands of big landowners. By the beginning of the twentieth century, just 5 percent of the population owned 95 percent of the arable land in Cochinchina.

Resentment festered. “Our soil is fertile, our mountains and rivers [are] beautiful,” the nationalist firebrand and pamphleteer Phan Boi Chau noted in 1907.

Three generations of Vietnamese nationalists struggled to provide answers to those questions. First, a group of mandarins led a guerrilla war aimed at restoring the Nguyen dynasty to its former splendor—and returning themselves to positions of power. The French defeated them, but it took a dozen years. A second generation of scholar-gentry, hostile to France but increasingly open to influence from the West and impatient with the way things had been done before the French arrived, fostered nationalist movements of their own. Some championed armed resistance and called for a constitutional monarchy or a democratic republic. Others deplored violence and insisted instead that France live up to the ideals it professed to cherish and teach the Vietnamese how they might rule themselves. The French considered all opposition suspect. Some nationalists were executed. Hundreds more were imprisoned.

None of these movements ever managed to broaden its appeal much beyond the urban middle-class world from which their leaders came. The communists were different. They set out from the first to unite Vietnam’s factory workers with the peasant majority, but they were plagued by factionalism: three communist parties competed with one another before Ho brought their leaders together in Hong Kong in 1930 and united them under a single banner. Still, the French proved too strong for them, crushing peasant rebellions in Tonkin and northern Annam in 1930, and again a decade later in Cochinchina. The French strafed demonstrators, bombed villages suspected of harboring rebels, and shot unarmed civilians. Party leadership in the South was virtually eliminated.

When France meekly surrendered to Nazi Germany after just six weeks of fighting in June 1940, many Vietnamese nationalists rejoiced in the humiliation of their colonial masters. Imperial Japan, soon to ally itself with Germany and eager to move against British and Dutch colonies throughout Asia, then forced the collaborationist Vichy French to permit them to station troops in Tonkin in exchange for the right to continue day-to-day administration of the colony. Within a year, Japanese soldiers would occupy all of Vietnam.

To some Vietnamese, the collapse of the French and the coming of the Japanese had seemed to signal a welcome end to white colonial rule. But Ho Chi Minh saw things differently. To him, the Japanese were alien invaders, no more welcome than the French. France might be an “imperialist wolf,” he said, but Japan was a “fascist hyena,” interested only in exploiting his country, commandeering rubber for its war machine, and seizing Vietnamese crops to fill its own rice bowls. “The Japanese [have] become the real masters,” he wrote. “The French [have] become kind of respectable slaves. And upon the Indo-Chinese falls the double honor of being not only slaves to the Japanese, but also slaves of the slaves—the French.”

Ho identified with the Allies, sure that they would eventually defeat the Japanese and hopeful that once the war was over they would reject the now-discredited French and reward Vietnamese nationalists with the independence they’d been seeking for decades. “It is a once-in-a-thousand-years propitious situation,” he told his followers, and he was determined to take advantage of it.

THE DECISIVE HOUR

ON FEBRUARY 8, 1941, Ho Chi Minh, disguised as one of the local Nung people, slipped across the Chinese border into Tonkin near the remote mountain village of Pac Bo and set up headquarters with a handful of followers in a limestone cave on the side of a mountain he named for Karl Marx, which overlooked a jungle stream he named for Lenin. The surrounding thickly wooded hills were already a communist stronghold, but he made sure that if a French patrol came too close, escape back into China was only steps away. Still, for the first time in three decades, he was back home in Vietnam.

He gathered the members of the Central Committee of the Indochinese Communist Party at Pac Bo in May, and persuaded them temporarily to submerge the party within a broad patriotic front to be called the League for the Independence of Vietnam—the Viet Minh. The time had come, he said, to rally “patriots of all ages and all types, peasants, workers, merchants and soldiers” to defeat the Japanese—as well as the French. Behind the scenes, communists would be in overall command, but nationalists of every kind would be welcome. Freedom from France would come first; party objectives like land redistribution could wait.

To build and lead a guerrilla liberation army, Ho called upon Vo Nguyen Giap, the one-time history teacher who had once instructed the children of Hanoi’s elite. Giap was an early convert to communism whose lifelong hatred of the French only deepened when he learned that his wife had died after being tortured in a French prison. He had already begun to develop a distinctive theory of revolutionary warfare based on his reading of Napoleon, the Chinese general Sun Tzu, and Lawrence of Arabia. In fighting the French and the Japanese, he said, his armies would be “everywhere and nowhere.”

The Viet Minh worked first to win the support of the Nung and other highland peoples living in the North, then spread their influence steadily southward from village to village across the Red River Delta. They strengthened their appeal by their efforts to alleviate the impact of the terrible famine that took between one and two million lives in the northern and north-central parts of the country during the winter of 1944–45. When neither the French nor the Japanese nor any other nationalist organization seemed capable of dealing with the crisis, the Viet Minh raided granaries, distributed rice to the hungry, and were widely hailed as saviors.

Meanwhile, the war went badly for the Japanese. By early 1945, their fleet had largely been destroyed. American forces were making one amphibious Pacific landing after another. Fearing that Indochina might be next and that their French allies would turn against them, the Japanese staged a coup on March 9. They killed some two thousand French officers and men, disarmed and interned twelve thousand more—and then, in an attempt to win Vietnamese support, declared Vietnam “independent” and allowed the puppet emperor, Bao Dai, to remain on the throne so long as he did their bidding.

In the end, the Americans never invaded Indochina. They focused instead on preparing to assault the Japanese home islands. But American agents working in southern China for the OSS—the Office of Strategic Services, wartime forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency—sought allies behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and rescue downed American pilots. Ho Chi Minh eagerly joined forces with them, hoping that if the Viet Minh came to America’s aid, then America would support Vietnam’s bid for independence once the fighting ended.

A six-man OSS team parachuted into his jungle encampment, supplied Ho’s men with modern arms, and marveled at how quickly they learned to handle them. Ho began to call his followers the “Viet-American Army.”

On August 14, Japan indicated her willingness to surrender. Two days later, Ho issued “an appeal to the Vietnamese people,” urging them to seize control of their country before Allied troops arrived in Indochina.